First, you get preggo, you get fat, you moan about your bones aching and your countless toilet trips throughout the night! You just want that baby out!

 

Then, you have your baby, you moan about your lack of sleep, your bleeding nipples, your sore vag, your lack of sleep, the state of your house, the desperation to get a shower, your lack of sleep!

 

Then, you have a toddler, you moan about their constant defience, their ability to throw the mother of all tantrums in the most public of places, their fickleness for every item of

food offered (all you’re trying to do is keep them alive), the way they can manipulate you making you feel like utter sh*t, and how they always basta*d win!

 

Then, you have school age kids and a desperate glimmer of something in them that makes you believe you haven’t raised a complete ars*ehole. They become less confrontational in public which means you can actually take them out in public again without the fear of a full on meltdown. They smile when they catch sight of you on sports day, they make you feel wanted and needed and after the

hell of the previous years it’s very much welcomed! You get comfortable, you think you’ve got this parenting thing licked.

 

Then you have teenagers!!!! The most challenging stage of mothering ever imagined. The only thing I could imagine it comparable to is being hit by a train, head on, full speed! When it happened for the first time (my son) I likened it to rolling a glass ball out into the world and hoping it doesn’t get smashed, a glass ball that I’d been carefully carrying around for 17 years!

 

I shared this analogy with

said son, he said ’yea I get it’ and then continued to roll off and slowly little chips started to appear.

 

NOTHING can prepare you for the teenage years, they’re hard and fast and way out of your control! You do all you can to survive, read books, have therapy, get the wine hooked up intravenously, whatever you need to just buy you some time before heading out looking for a bridge to throw yourself from.

 

You go from being their Mummy, their safe place, their confidence, their hero, to now being their challenger, their

dictator, their perpetual chastiser, the sh*t on their shoe (the £150 Nikes that YOU bought).

 

A complete 360 over night, NOTHING prepares you for that!

 

People keep telling me ”it’ll get easier once they’ve grown and appreciate you”. I’m not being funny but I’ve been hearing that regurgitated bull since I first moaned about the lack of sleep. So my question is ”when the fu*k does it get easier?? I’m starting to think it doesn’t?

 

My two eldest sons have totally flown the nest (one of them to the other side

of the world) and I’ve watched them go (through my tears). I fear they’re no longer mine, I rarely see them, they are living their own lives. Learning to accept that they are now adults in their own rights and respecting their choices (even when you can see the mistakes being made) it’s as hard as it always was. Less physical endurance but some serious headfuckery which reminds you, you’ll always be their mother and that mothering is hard.

 

*Disclaimer, it probably does get easier really, but I’m now ’parenting’ 6 kids aged 20 down to

4 so still pretty much in full on mothering mode and it’s still pretty hard! 

Where are you in your mothering journey?

Do you roll with it, or are you running up a very steep, slightly shitty hill each day?